Important to note that this side effect is still very rare and that we still use drugs with similarly serious and rare side effects.
The authors of the study do not recommend abandoning these drugs, rather we should understand and manage the risks.
The authors of the study do not recommend abandoning these drugs, rather we should understand and manage the risks.
While further study is necessary and some degree of caution may be warranted, it is still entirely plausible that semaglutide has no causal influence on NAION.
I wish people would stop repeating this falsehood.
The mass consumption of tobacco only really started after 1910, with the mechanisation of cigarette manufacturing. There was a multi-decade time lag between this explosion in tobacco use and the long-term sequelae of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. The causal link was established beyond any reasonable doubt in the late 1950s, which was really the earliest point at which we had clear data; it took only a few years for all major medical bodies to endorse this as the consensus position and start lobbying for legislative action.
"We didn't know" is a propaganda line rolled out by the tobacco industry, the asbestos industry, the fossil fuel industry and others. The lack of action wasn't due to any scientific uncertainty, but naked corruption at the highest level. There was an overwhelmingly clear scientific consensus which was privately accepted as true by these industries, but they paid off politicians to protect their profits.
We genuinely don't know if this is a real risk; NAION is a rare disease, which greatly increases the difficulty of making accurate inferences even from very large amounts of data. We can be extremely confident that the magnitude of risk is vastly smaller than the risks caused by Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
One thing about semaglutide is that it can lower blood sugar levels past normal, too. One of my diabetic friends had to lower her dose of Ozempic precisely for this reason. In general, it wouldn't surprise me if pathologies that involve ischemia could be exacerbated by a treatment that lowers energy supply as well.
If you have debilitating diabetes that has failed to respond to changes in exercise and diet. If your taking the drug as some type of "weight loss short cut" you should possibly reconsider that position.
"This is a serious but very rare side effect. Often, we only learn about this kind of thing after a new drug has been on the market for a few years, as is the case with Ozempic. It should be emphasised that it is neither more serious nor more common than the rare side effects of many other medicines that we continue to use. It is, so to speak, just a new piece of the puzzle of understanding how this drug works, explains Anton Pottegård."
> The researchers estimate that for every 10,000 people treated in a year, between 1.5 and 2.5 _extra_ cases will be seen.
The existing rate is about 2 per 10,000 people per year:
> Both Danish studies show that the risk of developing NAION for the individual patient receiving treatment with Ozempic is only 0.2 per thousand per year, which is fortunately significantly lower than in the American study. NAION is a relatively rare condition, and the extra risk is therefore low.